His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 101

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Chapter 101

The north field had never looked so wide.

It ran uphill from the back of the packhouse to the edge of the forest, a long slope of frosted grass that the pack had used for summer games and winter sledding for as long as I could remember My father had taught me to throw a punch on this field. Tonight, under a full white moon, it looked like what it was: open ground with nowhere to hide.

I stood at the center of it with thirty Moonhaven wolves spread out behind me. Most of them had already shifted. Their breath smoked in the cold air.

The training hall sat on the rise along the eastern edge, its windows dark. Abby was inside with Imogen, Chloe and Noah. I couldn’t see her, but I didn’t need to. Since the night at the cabin, she had lived under my ribs like a second heartbeat. Right now that heartbeat was fast and frightened and absolutely steady, all at the same time.

I’m fine, she said through the link, as if she could feel me checking. She probably could.

I know.

You’re doing it again.

Doing what?

Counting my breaths from three hundred yards away.

Despite everything, the corner of my mouth moved. Stay inside.

I’ll stay where you need me.

That wasn’t an answer, and we both knew it.

Knox paced under my skin, ready, hungry. Across the field, beneath the black line of the trees, the howling had stopped. That was worse than the noise. The silence had weight to it, as if the whole forest were holding its breath.

West line, Ryan’s voice came through the link. They’ve hit us. Six, maybe eight. They’re not pushing hard.

Hold them.

Liam?

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“Here they come,” someone said behind me.

let Knox take me.

The shift tore through me in one hard rush. Bone, muscle, fur. The world sharpened into scent and sound, and the moonlight that had been pale and cold to my human eyes became something almost tangible. I could smell the forest, the frost, my own wolves, and under all of it, coming down through the trees, the sour unwashed stink of rogues….

Lots of them.

They came out of the forest in a ragged line. Wolves first, two dozen or more, big and lean and scarred, none of them moving like a pack. Behind them came men in human form carrying something that glinted when the moonlight caught it.

Silver.

Chains, Knox snarled. Blades.

I howled once, and Moonhaven answered.

We met them a third of the way up the field.

The first rogue to reach me was a mottled brown male who went for my throat like he had been promised something for it. I took him off his feet and he didn’t get up. The second came from the side. The third came before the second was finished. For a few minutes there was nothing in the world but teeth and weight and the hot, copper taste of other wolves’ blood.

Then I began to notice how they were moving.

They weren’t fighting my wolves. Not really. They were going around them.

Every time a Moonhaven wolf engaged a rogue, another rogue slid past and closed toward me. They weren’t trying to win the field. They were trying to cut me off from it. Pull the line apart, isolate the Alpha, and finish him.

They want you, Knox said, almost with satisfaction. Let them come.

No. I pulled back toward my own wolves, toward the center. That’s what they want too.

A gray rogue came at my flank and I turned him over in the grass. When I lifted my head, I saw the

treeline.

The ground rose there into a low hump at the very top of the field, where the forest pushed out in a

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with silver, and her hands were raised.

Cressida.

couldn’t hear her over the fighting, but I could see her lips moving.

There were others with her. A handful of rogues in human form. One of them stood close beside her, holding someone by the arm-a smaller figure, a woman, I thought, though from that distance she was little more than shadow.

And beside the stone ring, a little apart from all of them, a tall man in black stood at the edge of the trees and watched the field.

He wasn’t fighting. He wasn’t giving orders. He was simply watching.

Knox’s hackles rose all down his spine. The wind turned, and for a heartbeat his scent reached me under the blood and the frost.

It was like smelling something I had forgotten I knew. Cedar smoke. Old leather. Something under it that was too close to my own.

Blackwell, Knox said. Not a question.

My uncle.

I had seen photographs of him at nineteen. I had heard my mother tell the story with her hands folded so tightly in her lap that her knuckles went white. I had a single blurred memory of being very high off the ground and laughing.

Now he stood at the edge of my field with my father’s height and my father’s shoulders, and he looked at me across a hundred yards of moonlit grass as if he had been waiting a long time.

A rogue hit me from the blind side while I was staring.

Teeth tore into my shoulder. I spun and threw him off and went after the next one, and when I

looked back toward the trees, Malachi hadn’t moved.

Kade. Abby’s voice, sharp. Something’s wrong with the moon.

At first I didn’t understand.

Then I did.

The light on the field was changing. It wasn’t clouds. The sky was clear, the moon round and enormous above the forest. But the brightness was draining out of the grass, the way color drains

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The weight came next.

I settled across my back like wet sand. My legs felt slow. All around me, Moonhaven wolves stumbled, as if they had been running for hours instead of minutes. The pull of the full moon-the strength every wolf took from it without thinking-was gone. Not weakened. Gone. Taken.

The rogues didn’t seem to feel it.

Or they had been ready for it.

Abby?

What came back through the bond wasn’t words. It was panic. Diana throwing herself at something she couldn’t reach, a door slammed shut in her face. For the first few seconds I could feel Abby reaching for the moon the way you’d reach for a railing in the dark, over and over, and finding nothing

there.

She’d been cut off.

That was the point of the stones, and it wasn’t only us.

The men with the silver came then.

They moved in behind the rogue wolves while my pack was still staggering. One of them swung something wide and low, and a net of fine silver chain spread through the air above me like a thrown handful of water.

I tried to get out from under it.

I was too slow.

It came down across my back and shoulders, and the burning was instant and total. Every link was a line of fire. Knox screamed and rolled and only tangled himself deeper. I tried to shift back, and the silver tore through the change before it could even begin, exactly as it had torn through Abby’s in the Įtemple.

Now I knew what she had felt, chained in that circle for a night and a day.

The thought made me want to kill everyone on this field.

I fought the net. The men dragging it fought me. Two of my wolves tried to reach me and were cut off by a wall of rogues who took the hits and didn’t give an inch. Through the burning I could see the moon, swollen and useless above the trees, and the men coming closer with their knives out.

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